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“Cracking the impact nut” or How the Youth Investment Fund learning and impact strand responds to the challenges of evaluation in open access provision

This blog has been written Matthew Hill, Head of Research and Learning at the Centre for Youth Impact.

Our YIF approach to data collectionNPC and the Centre for Youth Impact are leading the learning and impact strand of the £40 million Youth Investment Fund (YIF), which is a joint programme supported by government funding from DCMS and National Lottery funding from Big Lottery Fund. Eighty-six youth providers are being supported for three-years (2017-2020) to develop and expand their open access youth provision, and we are currently working them to design an evaluation approach that captures the value of their work, and supports their learning and improvement. Our overarching approach is an attempt to crack some of the perpetual practical and methodological nuts (my favourite bar snack) in measuring the impact of open access provision. This blog outlines five ways in which we are confronting these challenges within our work.

Moving away from blanket outcomes measurementThe past decade or so has seen a concerted push to be more outcomes focused. We continue to support an outcomes focused approach to service design and delivery (that is why we all do what we do after all) but our YIF-work represents a shift away from blanket outcome measurement (i.e. trying to capture every outcome for every young person for every organisation). This shift is a direct response to many of the perpetual challenges of outcome measurement in open access settings including fleeting or irregular engagement, defining generalised outcomes for individualised provision, developing robust metrics for broad personal change and the issue of measuring long term impacts. Far from abandoning outcome measurement, we are focusing on high quality targeted measurement with a sub-sample of the YIF cohort, which will ultimately provide us with more robust and meaningful data.

As well as this targeted approach to outcomes, our YIF-work places increased emphasis on the experience of young people and the quality of the provision they receive. Crucially, we are aiming to link the data on outputs, user feedback and quality to the targeted outcome data so we can understand not only whether the provision is having an impact on young people – but why.

Focusing on the user experienceAnother challenge is that young people often feel overburdened with rather obscure and meaningless (to them at least) surveys. In response, our YIF-approach focuses on the elements of delivery that are most relevant and meaningful to young people – namely their experience of services (e.g. feelings of safety, respect and positive challenge). We are working with Keystone accountability to develop a set of standardised feedback questions around this experience. Instead of large annual surveys this feedback process uses regular light touch feedback - perhaps 3-5 questions once a month. This ensures that user feedback is embedded in ongoing reflective practice, and crucially, means that organisations can respond more immediately to the findings. Critically, we are also working with providers to process and act on this feedback, and tell young people what has changed as a result.

Improving as well as provingAnother nut that needs cracking is practitioners’ sense of dislocation between a lot of impact measurement and their everyday work. Part of our commitment to ‘going with the grain’ of provision is a focus on the quality of youth work practice. This data absolutely has to be linked to outcomes data – as ultimately this dictates what is and what isn’t quality provision – but by emphasising considerations of quality we are focusing on those elements of provision that are most relevant and meaningful to youth workers themselves. Our YIF work is drawing on an established quality improvement framework from the US – the Youth Program Quality Assessment – which relies on peer observation with youth workers identifying ‘markers’ of quality in the delivery of their colleagues. This framework is not a critique of existing quality assessment frameworks but is, in fact, a complement to them – ensuring quality is also monitored and increased as part of ongoing practice improvement rather than just assessed against an existing standard.

Understanding young people’s journey through servicesAlthough most providers collect detailed attendance data, many tell us that they use this for monitoring overall service demand rather than truly understanding the way that individuals engage with their services. By utilising existing data and trialing new digital methods such as Yoti we aim to build a much more nuanced picture of what young people do with their feet i.e. how often they attend, for how long, and how they move through provision – as a proxy for their levels of engagement and ‘exposure’ to interactions.

Shared measurementArguably the greatest opportunity presented by the YIF is the potential to collect shared data across 86 grantees for three years. This offers a rare (probably unique) opportunity to build an evidence base across a huge diversity of open access provision (detached/ building-based; structured/ unstructured; universal/ targeted) and, by comparing the results across different types of provision, we will be able to really understand the strengths and weaknesses of different services.

We recognise the many challenges that open access providers face and believe that the dominant paradigm of measurement is not fit for such settings. Our YIF work has the potential to overcome some of these challenges, and develop approaches that are applicable across the wider sector. It is certainly ambitious and we are trying new things out – some of which will work but some of which will no doubt fail. We will confront this uncertainty with a pioneering spirit and a humbleness to admit when things don’t work. As well as grantees we are committed to working with the wider sector and we would greatly value your input in testing, refining and reflecting upon the tools and evidence that emerges. Our dedicated YIF learning and impact website will be live soon… so please stay posted… or email YIFlearning@thinkNPC.orgif you want to find out more in the meantime.

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